Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Game On by Collette West Blog Tour!

Title: Game On

Author: Collette West

Genre: Romance

Publication: October 17th, 2014

Pitching phenom Bruce "Jilly" Gillette has a hard time talking to women. His hulking presence of tattoos and muscles is what makes him an intimidating closer on the mound, yet off the field, he's painfully shy, uncomfortable in his own skin.

Desperate to revamp his loner image, the New York Kings hold a dream date contest, granting the lucky winner a night on the town with their surly reliever, doing whatever it takes to force Jilly out of his comfort zone.

Hailey Halpert enters the contest on a whim, looking for answers as to why her high school relationship with Jilly hit the skids. Now she’s a popular romance author writing under a pen name, and her reappearance in Jilly's life is no accident. It turns out that her novels are all about the sexy players on the Kings, and Jilly has no clue that he's about to become her new leading man.

Okay, so Game On has characters that aren’t usually what you see in a sports romance. Or at least these main characters are different. Jilly’s a shy guy, not one to be seen in public and comfortable talking. Also not a player. So that was different and something you enjoyed. Especially because you got both Jilly and Hailey’s perspectives. While they’re going on about how this is not what they wanted, you can get a laugh at some of the things they say while silently thanking the gods above that it isn’t you in that situation. It was great.

And then the plot thickens. They obviously didn’t have a good ending and it’s obvious Hailey has a secret. It’s obvious what Hailey’s secret is after a while but what wasn’t obvious is some of the people behind her secret coming out. So that’s a bit of a mystery left for you to solve. It gave a bit of curiosity while causing problems between Jilly and Hailey.

Then there was their relationship. It seemed that as soon as they got back on track, they would be off it again. It physically hurt me to read about that. Especially because we got both perspectives and were able to feel how much it hurt them. Collette West did a good job portraying their emotions.

Game On was a great read, and even though I haven’t really been interested in Baseball romances I most certainly will have to add the rest of her books in this series to my TBR list. Game On can be read as a standalone.

Collette West grew up as somewhat of a jock-nerd hybrid. Entering the world three weeks premature, her dad nearly missed her birth because he had seats behind the dugout for a sold-out, highly-anticipated match-up between two of baseball's biggest rivals. Not to be outdone, her book-loving mom taught her how to read by the time she was three. A love of the game coupled with an appreciation for the written word were instilled in Collette's impressionable brain from a young age. No wonder her characters believe in the philosophy: sports + romance = a little slice of heaven.

Splitting her time between the Pocono Mountains and Manhattan, Collette indulges her inner fangirl by going to as many games as she can from hockey to baseball and downloading every sports romance novel in existence onto her iPad. When she's not clicking away on her laptop, she enjoys walking her dog in Central Park, satisfying her caffeine craving at the Starbucks on Broadway and keeping an eye out for Mr. Right. But above all, she loves dishing with her readers. Email her at collette_west@yahoo.com.